


To Remember

by Elster



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-02
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elster/pseuds/Elster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack coming to terms after CoE. Not a fix-it, but I like to think it has a dash of hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Remember

Ianto comes back to him one misty September morning.  
Jack wakes at a bus station, his neck and back cracking when he sits up on the graffiti covered seats. And there he is, three piece suit, hands in his trouser pockets, leaning against a greasy wall and watching Jack. He smiles apologetically when their eyes meet, but that's all Jack sees, because he's panicking, turning and going away, running eventually. Ianto doesn't follow him.  
Which is a fucked up thought. He wasn't really there.  
Jack tries to clear his head, but everything he has done comes back to him, and he can't deal with it, it's crushing. With thoughts it's the same as with places: he doesn't know where to turn to. Story of his life and he really needs a new one.  
He's done this, often. He can do it again. Start new.  
It's just that he can't remember ever feeling so disgusted with himself. He remembers grief and doubt, mistrust and the bone deep weariness of the last years before he met the doctor again. He's been sick of losing, of being used or left behind, sick of waiting or of the world. But never has he been sick of being himself.  
You can run from everything, but that one's kind of tricky.

Some days later when Jack wakes in a dark hotel room, Ianto's back. He's sitting in the armchair nearest to the door and watching Jack. Jack doesn't move, just looks back, and he thinks that it's kind of funny (in a really not funny way), because Ianto has never been one for sitting around idly and watching his lover sleep wasn't really his style.  
“Getting caught doing it wasn't really my style”, Ianto says and Jack's startled by his voice.  
He struggles for anything to say. “I'm sorry” is all he can think of and his voice is too horse to really understand it.  
Unsurprisingly, Ianto hears it anyway. “What for?” he asks, interested, as if there wasn't a whole list of obvious answers.  
Jack sits up in bed and stares at him. “Well, for one thing: you're dead!” he says viciously. He's losing it and he doesn't really mind, but he's not in the mood of playing games with his delusions.  
Ianto gives an uneasy shrug. “Don't think I'm not upset about that-”  
“Shut up!” Jack shouts. He can't deal with this. Not now, not ever. “Just... don't.”  
Ianto watches silently as Jack gets up and escapes to the bathroom. When the door clicks into the lock, Jack leans against it and waits. For a long time there's no sound in the other room.  
“You can be so fucking patronising at times.” Ianto's voice comes right from the other side of the door, Jack can picture him, standing there, calm but stiff, his hands balled to fists at his side. “I decided to die that way or another the day I decided to stay. I'm no stupid child. I know what I do and I know whom I follow.” He pauses and silently he ads: “I know you, Jack.”  
This last sentence is so much, but most of all, it's a plea not to contradict it. Jack listens to the silence that follows. It takes some time, before he's sure, he's alone. He slides down the bathroom door until he's sitting on the cold tiles. He doesn't know, what to do.

“Who's she?”, Ianto asks.  
Jack growls and blinks into the light. “What?”  
Ianto is leaning against a desk overflowing with clutter and messy stacks of paper. There are posters on the walls; Jack's reasonably sure, he's in a dormitory room. He looks over his shoulder at a sleeping girl and grasps for memories of last night. The few he can find are blurry at best. He'd be hard pressed to say what continent he's on, never mind a name. He groans and lets his head fall back on the pillow. After a moment of contemplating the ceiling he glances over at Ianto again. He just stands there, in a different suit than before, irritatingly calm, and then, after a few seconds of staring, lifts an eyebrow. Jack really misses the eyebrow.  
“What?”, he whispers, less real words than a mere movement of lips, because he doesn't want to wake her, “She's just some girl, what does it matter to you?”  
Ianto sighs and crouches down before him. Face to face, Jack can smell him, but he doesn't move. He doesn't dare to touch. “It doesn't”, Ianto says quietly. “I'm just making conversation. You're the one who wants to talk to me.”  
“I really don't.” It's not comforting, it just hurts and between all the regret he's feeling, he isn't sure, if this lie ads to it.  
Ianto just looks at him for a moment, then nods. “Okay”, he says softly.  
Jack closes his eyes and when he opens them again, Ianto has vanished.

After that it lasts longer for him to come back. And then it's not morning for a change, or maybe it is, Jack can't tell, he's really drunk. He's on a roof and contemplates jumping. The thing is to get drunk enough to forget how pointless this is.  
Ianto stands about six feet from the edge, which is the usual distance. He calls it being uncomfortable with heights, because he can't stand it to have irrational fears.  
“Do you want me to stop you?” Ianto asks. He sounds kind of cold and definitely sarcastic, which makes Jack angry.  
“I don't even want you to haunt me”, he says.  
Ianto has a laugh that signifies the opposite of amusement. It's a disgusted hollow sound and part of his passive aggressive charm.  
Jack is annoyed. Mainly with his miserable life that just stretches on and on and on, but Ianto disturbing his maudlin drunkness is as good a substitute as any. “I'm sorry, okay?”  
“I get that. Namely with yourself.”  
Jack turns around and takes an unsteady step away from the edge, towards Ianto. “What? You think I don't have the right?”  
Ianto smiles his sarcastic smile, the one Jack hates. “I think whatever you want me to think. I hope you appreciate the irony.”  
Jack doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know if he wants to say anything, because really, what's the point? He sits down on the concrete, because standing upright got too exhausting. “You never had to kill someone you love, someone you should have protected”, he says eventually. It sounds useless and defensive to his own ears.  
“No”, Ianto says, and he doesn't sound pissed off any more, just tired. “You did.”  
“I'm sorry.” Jack thinks about how words lose their meaning when you repeat them often enough and maybe, if he says it often enough, he can lose the feeling.  
Ianto shakes his head. “It wasn't your fault, and Steven wasn't either.”  
Jack ignores him. “How did you live with it?”  
“You know how,” is Ianto's dry answer. They watch each other and Jack actually flinches, when Ianto moves. He sits down next to him, not touching and not near enough to feel any warmth. “Close your eyes.”  
Jack does and he thinks he can feel it faintly, as long as he doesn't concentrate too hard. A hand in his hair and an arm around his shoulder; the ghost of a hug. He cries and he sleeps and when he wakes it's the sun shining brightly on his hangover.

“You know, I'm really not sure if I looked like this”, Ianto says. He's half turning left and right before the tiny mirror over the sink of Jack's prison cell. Jack isn't quite sure how he got here and he's bored out of his mind, because he hasn't quite figured out how to get out again, yet.  
“I'm sure you did,” he says.  
“I'm sure you're sure.” Ianto drawls over his shoulder and quirks his sceptical eyebrow.  
It makes Jack smile despite himself. “You're dead and you're worried that you're not as pretty any more?”  
“No, I think you're idealising. Look at those cheek bones.”  
“I do,” Jack says in his best flirting voice, but he is ignored.  
“And you think they always looked like this?”  
“Don't make me angst about forgetting you,” he says half-serious.  
Ianto turns away from the mirror and sits down at the other end of the cot. “You should go back to Gwen, Jack.”  
Jack makes an unwilling noise. “I'm not really sure, if you would have said something like this.”  
“I was never jealous of Gwen,” Ianto says indignantly.  
“Right.”  
That makes him rolls his eyes so hard it looks painful. “Not in that way. God, you're so vain.”  
“And yet you loved me.” It sounds spiteful.  
“Don't say that like you want to stab someone with it,” Ianto says coolly. “It doesn't matter either way, does it? You're drifting and that's not what you need.”  
“It's how it works, you drift till you stick somewhere.”  
Ianto looks around the prison cell. “You're stuck here,” he comments.  
“Temporary,” Jack amends. “Look, it's not like I'm not trying. It's just too hard. Everywhere are kids that remind me of Steven and-”  
“So leave. Or go back. Just decide already, you've had months. You know Gwen's waiting for you, it's not fair.”  
“That's your problem? Gwen waiting?”  
“I happen to know the feeling.”

When the cruiser leaves the solar system, Jack feels empty. As feelings of emptiness go, it's one of the better kind. More relief than amputation, at least for the moment. Jack watches the sun shrink until it's just one of many stars. When he turns away from the window, he's not surprised to find Ianto beside him.  
“You're here,” he says.  
Ianto shrugs as if to say _where else should I be_. “You promised.”


End file.
